Over decades, with that false promise accepted as gospel by millions of devotees, Fox News radicalized a nation and spawned more extreme successors such as Newsmax and One America News.
In the Trump era, the network — now out of favor for not being quite as shameless as the president demands — was his best friend and promoter. So to put it bluntly: The mob that stormed and desecrated the Capitol on Wednesday could not have existed in a country that hadn’t been radicalized by the likes of Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, and swayed by biased news coverage.
Since this is an especially good day for calling out the names of those to blame, here are a few more from the leadership of Fox News: Rupert Murdoch. Lachlan Murdoch. Suzanne Scott.
Rather than staying with news coverage on Wednesday evening, Fox allowed its usual prime-time hosts, the guiltiest parties, to spew their misleading toxicity — particularly in repeated suggestions that a significant number of rioters weren’t really Trump supporters at all, but perhaps leftist infiltrators.
And even on Thursday morning, as the nation woke up to contemplate the horror of what had unspooled, they were still at it. One of Trump’s most avid cheerleaders, Pete Hegseth, rejected the notion that Trump incited the riot. Rather it was “the result of a frustration that a lot of people feel” about their values and beliefs being dissed in an America leaning toward socialism. “What do folks expect to happen?” he asked rhetorically.
Where on earth, I wonder — on what popular cable network — could so many people have gotten the idea, day after day, that the election was stolen and their values were being systematically denied?
The pro-Trump media — led by Fox News — has earned its disgraceful place near the top of the list of infamy.
They own this.